Kahlil Gibran

Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān () (January 6, 1883 – April 10, 1931), usually referred to in English as Kahlil Gibran, was a Lebanese-American writer, poet and visual artist. He was also considered a philosopher, although he himself rejected the title. He is best known as the author of The Prophet, which was first published in the United States in 1923 and has since become one of the best-selling books of all time, having been translated into more than 100 languages.

Born in Bsharri, a village of the Ottoman-ruled Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate to a Maronite Christian family, young Gibran immigrated with his mother and siblings to the United States in 1895. As his mother worked as a seamstress, he was enrolled at a school in Boston, where his creative abilities were quickly noticed by a teacher who presented him to photographer and publisher F. Holland Day. Gibran was sent back to his native land by his family at the age of fifteen to enroll at the Collège de la Sagesse in Beirut. Returning to Boston upon his youngest sister's death in 1902, he lost his older half-brother and his mother the following year, seemingly relying afterwards on his remaining sister's income from her work at a dressmaker's shop for some time.

In 1904, Gibran's drawings were displayed for the first time at Day's studio in Boston, and his first book in Arabic was published in 1905 in New York City. With the financial help of a newly met benefactress, Mary Haskell, Gibran studied art in Paris from 1908 to 1910. While there, he came in contact with Syrian political thinkers promoting rebellion in Ottoman Syria after the Young Turk Revolution; would eventually be banned by the Ottoman authorities. In 1911, Gibran settled in New York, where his first book in English, The Madman, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1918, with writing of The Prophet or The Earth Gods also underway. His visual artwork was shown at Montross Gallery in 1914, and at the galleries of M. Knoedler & Co. in 1917. He had also been corresponding remarkably with May Ziadeh since 1912. His "prodigious body of work" has been described as "an artistic legacy to people of all nations".

Life and career

Childhood

Gibran was born January 6, 1883, in the village of Bsharri in the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate (modern-day Lebanon). The few records mentioning the Gibrans indicate that they arrived at Bsharri towards the end of the 17th century. While a family myth links them to Chaldean sources, a more plausible story relates that the Gibran family came from Damascus, Syria, in the 16th-century, and settled on a farm near Baalbek, later moving to Bash'elah in 1672. Another story places the origin of the Gibran family in Acre before migrating to Bash'elah in the year 1300. She was thirty when Gibran was born, and Gibran's father, Khalil, was her third husband. Gibran had two younger sisters, Marianna and Sultana, and an older half-brother, Boutros, from one of Kamila's previous marriages. Gibran's family lived in poverty. In 1888, Gibran entered Bsharri's one-class school, which was run by a priest, and there he learnt the rudiments of Arabic, Syriac, and arithmetic.

Gibran's father initially worked in an apothecary, but he had gambling debts he was unable to pay. He went to work for a local Ottoman-appointed administrator. In 1891, while acting as a tax collector, he was removed and his staff was investigated. Khalil was imprisoned for embezzlement, and his family's property was confiscated by the authorities. Kamila decided to follow her brother to the United States. Although Khalil was released in 1894, Kamila remained resolved and left for New York on June 25, 1895, taking Boutros, Gibran, Marianna and Sultana with her.

thumb|125px|left|[[F. Holland Day, ]]

thumb|right|Photograph of Gibran by F. Holland Day,

Kamila and her children settled in Boston's South End, at the time the second-largest Syrian-Lebanese-American community in the United States. Gibran entered the Josiah Quincy School on September 30, 1895. School officials placed him in a special class for immigrants to learn English. His name was registered using the anglicized spelling 'Kahlil Gibran'. Gibran would develop a romantic attachment to her. The same year, a publisher used some of Gibran's drawings for book covers.

thumb|left|upright|The [[Collège de la Sagesse|Collège maronite de la Sagesse in Beirut]]

Kamila and Boutros wanted Gibran to absorb more of his own heritage rather than just the Western aesthetic culture he was attracted to. Thus, at the age of 15, Gibran returned to his homeland to study Arabic literature for three years at the Collège de la Sagesse, a Maronite-run institute in Beirut, also learning French. In his final year at the school, Gibran created a student magazine with other students, including Youssef Howayek (who would remain a lifelong friend of his), and he was made the "college poet". In Paris, Gibran socialized within the Parisian intellectual establishment, he was acquainted with Auguste Rodin and recognized as accomplished artist.

On April 2, 1902, Sultana died at the age of 14, from what is believed to have been tuberculosis. Two days later, Peabody "left him without explanation." but never married because Haskell's family objected, other evidence suggests that their relationship was never physically consummated. Gibran and Haskell were engaged briefly between 1910 and 1911. According to Joseph P. Ghougassian, Gibran had proposed to her "not knowing how to repay back in gratitude to Miss Haskell," but Haskell called it off, making it "clear to him that she preferred his friendship to any burdensome tie of marriage." Haskell would later marry Jacob Florance Minis in 1926, while remaining Gibran's close friend, patroness and benefactress, and using her influence to advance his career.

It was in 1904 also that Gibran met Amin al-Ghurayyib, editor of Al-Mohajer ('The Emigrant'), where Gibran started to publish articles. In 1905, Gibran's first published written work was A Profile of the Art of Music, in Arabic, by Al-Mohajers printing department in New York City. His next work, Nymphs of the Valley, was published the following year, also in Arabic. On January 27, 1908, Haskell introduced Gibran to her friend writer Charlotte Teller, aged 31, and in February, to Émilie Michel (Micheline), a French teacher at Haskell's school, aged 19. Both Teller and Micheline agreed to pose for Gibran as models and became close friends of his. The same year, Gibran published Spirits Rebellious in Arabic, a novel deeply critical of secular and spiritual authority. According to Barbara Young, a late acquaintance of Gibran, "in an incredibly short time it was burned in the market place in Beirut by priestly zealots who pronounced it 'dangerous, revolutionary, and poisonous to youth. The Maronite Patriarchate would let the rumor of his excommunication wander, but would never officially pronounce it.

thumb|upright|Plaque at 14 [[Avenue du Maine, Paris, where Gibran lived from 1908 to 1910]]

In July 1908, with Haskell's financial support, Gibran went to study art in Paris at the Académie Julian where he joined the atelier of Jean-Paul Laurens. "She became pregnant, but the pregnancy was ectopic, and she had to have an abortion, probably in France." Rihani, who was six years older than Gibran, would be Gibran's role model for a while, and a friend until at least May 1912. Gibran biographer Robin Waterfield argues that, by 1918, "as Gibran's role changed from that of angry young man to that of prophet, Rihani could no longer act as a paradigm".

Return to the United States and growing reputation

Gibran sailed back to New York City from Boulogne-sur-Mer on the Nieuw Amsterdam on October 22, 1910, and was back in Boston by November 11. Over time, however, and "ostensibly often for reasons of health", he would spend "longer and longer periods away from New York, sometimes months at a time [...], staying either with friends in the countryside or with Marianna in Boston or on the Massachusetts coast." His friendships with Teller and Micheline would wane; the last encounter between Gibran and Teller would occur in September 1912, and Gibran would tell Haskell in 1914 that he now found Micheline "repellent." dying in 1953. Micheline married a New York City attorney, Lamar Hardy, on October 14, 1914.

Gibran and Ziadeh never met. According to Shlomit C. Schuster, "whatever the relationship between Kahlil and May might have been, the letters in A Self-Portrait mainly reveal their literary ties. Ziadeh reviewed all of Gibran's books and Gibran replies to these reviews elegantly."

In 1913, Gibran started contributing to Al-Funoon, an Arabic-language magazine that had been recently established by Nasib Arida and Abd al-Masih Haddad. A Tear and a Smile was published in Arabic in 1914. In December of the same year, visual artworks by Gibran were shown at the Montross Gallery, catching the attention of American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder. Gibran wrote him a prose poem in January and would become one of the aged man's last visitors. After Ryder's death in 1917, Gibran's poem would be quoted first by Henry McBride in the latter's posthumous tribute to Ryder, then by newspapers across the country, from which would come the first widespread mention of Gibran's name in America. By March 1915, two of Gibran's poems had also been read at the Poetry Society of America, after which Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, the younger sister of Theodore Roosevelt, stood up and called them "destructive and diabolical stuff"; nevertheless, beginning in 1918 Gibran would become a frequent visitor at Robinson's, also meeting her brother. had previously made a review of Broken Wings in his article "The Dawn of Hope After the Night of Despair", published in Al-Funoon, and he would become "a close friend and confidant, and later one of Gibran's biographers." In 1917, an exhibition of forty wash drawings was held at Knoedler in New York from January 29 to February 19 and another of thirty such drawings at Doll & Richards, Boston, April 16–28. and The Forerunner in New York.

In a letter of 1921 to Naimy, Gibran reported that doctors had told him to "give up all kinds of work and exertion for six months, and do nothing but eat, drink and rest"; in 1922, Gibran was ordered to "stay away from cities and city life" and had rented a cottage near the sea, planning to move there with Marianna and to remain until "this heart [regained] its orderly course"; this three-month summer in Scituate, he later told Haskell, was a refreshing time, during which he wrote some of "the best Arabic poems" he had ever written.

thumb|upright|First edition cover of [[The Prophet (book)|The Prophet (1923)]]

In 1923, The New and the Marvelous was published in Arabic in Cairo, whereas The Prophet was published in New York. The Prophet sold well despite a cool critical reception. At a reading of The Prophet organized by rector William Norman Guthrie in St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, Gibran met poet Barbara Young, who would occasionally work as his secretary from 1925 until Gibran's death; Young did this work without remuneration. In 1924, Gibran told Haskell that he had been contracted to write ten pieces for Al-Hilal in Cairo.

Later years and death

thumb|left|A late photograph of Gibran

Sand and Foam was published in 1926, and Jesus, the Son of Man in 1928. At the beginning of 1929, Gibran was diagnosed with an enlarged liver.

thumb|upright|The [[Gibran Museum and Gibran's final resting place, in Bsharri]]

Gibran Museum and royalties

Gibran had expressed the wish that he be buried in Lebanon. His body lay temporarily at Mount Benedict Cemetery in Boston before it was taken on July 23 to Providence, Rhode Island, and from there to Lebanon on the liner Sinaia. Gibran's body reached Bsharri in August and was deposited in a church near-by until a cousin of Gibran finalized the purchase of the Mar Sarkis Monastery, now the Gibran Museum.

All future American royalties to his books were willed to his hometown of Bsharri, to be used for "civic betterment." Gibran had also willed the contents of his studio to Haskell. Gibran discussed "such themes as religion, justice, free will, science, love, happiness, the soul, the body, and death" in his writings, which were "characterized by innovation breaking with forms of the past, by symbolism, an undying love for his native land, and a sentimental, melancholic yet often oratorical style." According to Salma Jayyusi, Roger Allen and others, Gibran as the leading poet of the Mahjar school belongs to Romantic (neo-romantic) movement.

About his language in general (both in Arabic and English), Salma Khadra Jayyusi remarks that "because of the spiritual and universal aspect of his general themes, he seems to have chosen a vocabulary less idiomatic than would normally have been chosen by a modern poet conscious of modernism in language." According to Jean Gibran and Kahlil G. Gibran,

The poem "You Have Your Language and I Have Mine" (1924) was published in response to criticism of his Arabic language and style.

Influences and antecedents

According to Bushrui and Jenkins, an "inexhaustible" source of influence on Gibran was the Bible, especially the King James Version. Gibran's literary oeuvre is also steeped in the Syriac tradition. According to Haskell, Gibran once told her that As worded by Waterfield, "the parables of the New Testament" affected "his parables and homilies" while "the poetry of some of the Old Testament books" affected "his devotional language and incantational rhythms." Annie Salem Otto notes that Gibran avowedly imitated the style of the Bible, whereas other Arabic authors from his time like Rihani unconsciously imitated the Quran.

thumb|upright|Portrait of [[William Blake by Thomas Phillips (detail)]]

According to Ghougassian, the works of English poet William Blake "played a special role in Gibran's life", and in particular "Gibran agreed with Blake's apocalyptic vision of the world as the latter expressed it in his poetry and art." Gibran wrote of Blake as "the God-man", and of his drawings as "so far the profoundest things done in English—and his vision, putting aside his drawings and poems, is the most godly." According to George Nicolas El-Hage,

thumb|left|upright|Drawing of [[Francis Marrash by Gibran, ]]

Gibran was also a great admirer of Syrian poet and writer Francis Marrash, whose works Gibran had studied at the Collège de la Sagesse. According to Shmuel Moreh, Gibran's own works echo Marrash's style, including the structure of some of his works and "many of [his] ideas on enslavement, education, women's liberation, truth, the natural goodness of man, and the corrupted morals of society." Bushrui and Jenkins have mentioned Marrash's concept of universal love, in particular, in having left a "profound impression" on Gibran. Nevertheless, although Nietzsche's style "no doubt fascinated" him, Gibran was "not the least under his spell": Bushrui and John M. Munro have argued that "the failure of serious Western critics to respond to Gibran" resulted from the fact that "his works, though for the most part originally written in English, cannot be comfortably accommodated within the Western literary tradition."

Visual art

Overview

According to Waterfield, "Gibran was confirmed in his aspiration to be a Symbolist painter" after working in Marcel-Béronneau's studio in Paris. In her diary entry of March 17, 1911, Haskell recorded that Gibran told her he was inspired by J. M. W. Turner's painting The Slave Ship (1840) to utilize "raw colors [...] one over another on the canvas [...] instead of killing them first on the palette" in what would become the painting Rose Sleeves (1911, Telfair Museums).

Gibran created more than seven hundred visual artworks, including the Temple of Art portrait series. His works may be seen at the Gibran Museum in Bsharri; the Telfair Museums in Savannah, Georgia; the Museo Soumaya in Mexico City; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha; the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; and the Harvard Art Museums. A possible Gibran painting was the subject of a September 2008 episode of the PBS TV series History Detectives.

Gallery

<gallery mode="packed-hover" heights="200px">

Ages of Women by Kahlil Gibran - Soumaya.jpg|The Ages of Women, 1910 (Museo Soumaya)

Khalil Gibran - Autorretrato con musa, c. 1911.jpg|Self-Portrait and Muse, (Museo Soumaya)

Untitled (Rose Sleeves) by Kahlil Gibran.jpg|Untitled (Rose Sleeves), 1911 (Telfair Museums)

Towards the Infinite (Kamila Gibran, mother of the artist) MET 87681.jpg|Towards the Infinite (Kamila Gibran, mother of the artist), 1916 (Metropolitan Museum of Arts)

The Three are One by Kahlil Gibran.jpg|The Three are One, 1918 (Telfair Museums), also The Madmans frontispiece

The Slave by Kahlil Gibran.jpg|The Slave, 1920 (Harvard Art Museums)

Standing Figure and Child by Kahlil Gibran.jpg|Standing Figure and Child, undated (Barjeel Art Foundation)

</gallery>

Religious views

thumb|A 1923 sketch by Gibran for his book Jesus the Son of Man (published 1928)

According to Bushrui and Jenkins,